Hitherto, electric flash device have been used for photographing in dark places, for signaling or for commercial sign. Especially, they are much used as the photographing devices.
For such photographing flash lamps, in order to be used together with small size photographic camera it is preferable that the photographic flash lamp should be as small in size as possible.
A conventional photographic flash lamp of FIG. 8 comprises, as shown in a circuit diagram of FIG. 1 and in a perspective view with its case 100 removed of FIG. 9, two or four AA size batteries 5,5, a DC-DC converter part 1, a trigger circuit part 3 and a gas-discharge lamp part 4 including a gas-discharge lamp tube such as xenon-discharge tube 38. The DC-DC converter part 1 includes a converter transformer 8, and the trigger circuit part 3 includes a trigger transformer 18. As shown in FIG. 9, in the conventional photographic flash device, the height of a reflector 39 of the lamp and diameter of the capacitor 37 have had sizes which are larger than the diameter of the batteries 5,5. Accordingly, inside height of the case 100 has been decided to be a little greater than the diameter of the capacitor. Therefore, when these parts are installed in the case 100, there is formed a non-utilized space 41 under or above the batteries 5,5. Furthermore, in such conventional photographic flash device, the converter transformer 8, which has been shaped in ordinary roughly cubic type transformer, has generally been linearly arranged in the same line with the capacitor 37 and the lamp reflector 39, and therefore, these linearly located parts have took a considerable length, so that when the length has been longer than that of batteries 5,5, there have been formed another non-utilized space 42 facing the bottoms of the batteries 5,5. Existence of such two non-utilized spaces in the case of the conventional photographic device is an obstacle against miniaturization of the photographic flash device, even when the circuit part utilizes other miniaturized electronic parts such as transistors diodes, small sizes resistors, small size capacitors, small size neon lamp, small size switch, etc.